In which one woman drops knowledge, fights terrorist scum and eviscerates Manchurian Muslim Presidents from her kitchen with a Mac. She must be a blogger.
because for over ten years now Paddy McTammany has had a prepared speech on the subject in my briefcase, right next to that list of 318 State Department Qommies that nobody is interested in either.
To be brief: though I cannot tell you whether you are safer, I do think I know how you can find out for yourself. Simply have a word with whatever noble Corporate Citizenness it may be who writes the casualty insurance policies on your airliners and your skyscrapers. Or maybe a glance at your premium bills would suffice.
Those gentlemen are bound to know, it seems to me. They are even bound, unlike certain other types of noble C. C., to TELL what they know, because if they do not, ¿How can they bill you properly?
Moreover, unlike dancers and bloggers, insurance Titans must be utterly unsentimental about assessing your security. Their livelihood depends on mathematics, not on Party hormones or fancy footwork. [*]
Happy days.
___
[*] Should you happen to be clinically paranoid, however, I guess you might worry that these supposedly actuarial gentry are secretly fundin’ a certain Party I know of but shall not specify that invests heavily in the Chicken Little School of Terrorism Studies. Though not strictly honorable, there would be some pretty obvious pluses to being able to set premiums four or five times higher than probability strictly warrants.
On the other hand, if AEIdeology and Chicagonomics are not TOTAL tripe an’ baloney, the attempt to do this ought to fail: some bold jobcreator will come along an’ undersell the cartel.
(( Few stables are muckier than those of the former (?) Democratic Leadership Council ))
The poll on Jewish voters was commissioned by Secure America Now, an organization seeking to call attention to “[o]ur national government’s policies of engagement of sworn enemies like Iran and North Korea have failed and are allowing these outlaw nations to progress in their plans to attain nuclear weapons.” (North Korea actually successfully tested a nuclear weapon during the Bush administration.)
Think Progress asked John McLaughlin about Secure America Now and he told us: “Pat [Caddell] and I worked with [Secure America Now] to do the survey. […] They paid for it.”
When asked yesterday if he could provide a contact name for the organization, he responded that he would have to get back to us since “I don’t want to give you the wrong information.”
A little research revealed an article on the conservative Big Peace website from February, discussing how Secure America Now was founded by John McLaughlin and Pat Caddell to “inject national security issues into the public dialogue.”
McLaughlin acknowledged his leadership role at Secure America Now in a phone conversation today, and explaining to ThinkProgress why he didn’t provide a contact name yesterday because “We don’t have any staff yet so that’s what I was looking for. You know, we’re just putting [Secure America Now] together.”
The poll makes no mention of the fact that an organization Caddell described as “a grassroots place where people can join up and begin to do things to force [national security and foreign policy] issues into the debate,” commissioned its own founders to conduct the poll.
Happy days.
P.S. The association is probably private to myself, but that bit of poker-faced selfnavel-gazin’ tomfoolery did distinctly remind Paddy McTammany of the following little gem of literary criticism:
The poet who finds by introspection that the soul is mere chaos is like a policeman who, having himself stopped all the traffic in a certain street, should then solemnly write down in his notebook ”The stillness in this street is highly suspicious.”
whosmindingdemintsays
what with Boston cops, Amtrack cops, TSA cops, Transit cops, and all those other cops not readily identifiable to the criminal sort and desperately quiet pedestrian, not to mention the TeeVee monitor of Perpetual Indoctrination spooling, over and over, all the great things about “security” and how we should all snitch on the brown people carrying backpacks, we are given the illusion of safety. And when the security forces get bored, rousting homeless people offers periodic diversion.
SomervilleTomsays
This is apparently the best garbage money can buy — two minutes of pure unadulterated right wing feces.
First and foremost, the pervasive paranoia that the protagonist mentions (I first thought it was ironic) is just that — paranoia. It provides approximately as much protection from terror as the duck-and-cover “strategies” of the fifties:
Both are a kind of public (and very expensive) Kibuki theater. The purpose of the production is to persuade us that something is being done. The fact that the actions are themselves utterly worthless (or worse) is immaterial — it is propaganda, pure and simple.
The answer to the actual question she asks (“Are we safer”) is resoundingly YES!
Further, the current foreign fiasco of Mitt Romney demonstrates how fragile our growing safety is.
* His racist and ignorant comments about Israeli “culture” betray a contempt for the Arab people (and especially Palestinian people) that confirms the darkest accusations of the extremist Muslim world against us.
* The Israeli policies that he supports have led to non-stop war, instability, and human suffering for decades
* The 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed the region’s strongest secular counterbalance to the Iranian theocracy. In doing so, it exemplifies the ignorant bullying incompetence that has dominated GOP dogma for decades.
We are safer today than we were four years ago because we have walked closer to the civilized world in our response to radical Islamic movements. We are safer today because we have rejected formal policies of kidnap, abuse, torture, and murder. We would be safer still had we closed GITMO.
The most powerful thing we can do, today, to restore our safety and regain our sense of security is to reject this right-wing paranoia and return to the policies of freedom, openness, and tolerance that make us strong.
Christophersays
Their goal is to make us all live in fear and for the narrator of this spot it seems to have worked. I actually do NOT think about terror when I do those things she mentions in the beginning. She is wrong about how we got intel on Bin Laden’s whereabouts and won’t even give this President credit for concluding that particular operation.
mssays
In these pieces, the warmongers push this “Terra-Booga-Muslims-Scary” theme, with no brass tacks specifics about what is really going on in these nations.
These lying warmongers had us attack Iraq. Iraq has never attacked us, and Saddam Hussein had Al-Qaeda types dipped in acid in front of him while he drank whiskey and smoked cigars.
Also, AL-QAEDA IS SUNNI (AND MILITANTLY ANTI-SHIA) WHILE IRAN IS A SHIA THEOCRACY.
The push for war makes no sense when you look at what is really happening.
JHM says
because for over ten years now Paddy McTammany has had a prepared speech on the subject in my briefcase, right next to that list of 318 State Department Qommies that nobody is interested in either.
To be brief: though I cannot tell you whether you are safer, I do think I know how you can find out for yourself. Simply have a word with whatever noble Corporate Citizenness it may be who writes the casualty insurance policies on your airliners and your skyscrapers. Or maybe a glance at your premium bills would suffice.
Those gentlemen are bound to know, it seems to me. They are even bound, unlike certain other types of noble C. C., to TELL what they know, because if they do not, ¿How can they bill you properly?
Moreover, unlike dancers and bloggers, insurance Titans must be utterly unsentimental about assessing your security. Their livelihood depends on mathematics, not on Party hormones or fancy footwork. [*]
Happy days.
___
[*] Should you happen to be clinically paranoid, however, I guess you might worry that these supposedly actuarial gentry are secretly fundin’ a certain Party I know of but shall not specify that invests heavily in the Chicken Little School of Terrorism Studies. Though not strictly honorable, there would be some pretty obvious pluses to being able to set premiums four or five times higher than probability strictly warrants.
On the other hand, if AEIdeology and Chicagonomics are not TOTAL tripe an’ baloney, the attempt to do this ought to fail: some bold jobcreator will come along an’ undersell the cartel.
But Mammon knows best.
JHM says
(( Few stables are muckier than those of the former (?) Democratic Leadership Council ))
Happy days.
P.S. The association is probably private to myself, but that bit of poker-faced selfnavel-gazin’ tomfoolery did distinctly remind Paddy McTammany of the following little gem of literary criticism:
whosmindingdemint says
what with Boston cops, Amtrack cops, TSA cops, Transit cops, and all those other cops not readily identifiable to the criminal sort and desperately quiet pedestrian, not to mention the TeeVee monitor of Perpetual Indoctrination spooling, over and over, all the great things about “security” and how we should all snitch on the brown people carrying backpacks, we are given the illusion of safety. And when the security forces get bored, rousting homeless people offers periodic diversion.
SomervilleTom says
This is apparently the best garbage money can buy — two minutes of pure unadulterated right wing feces.
First and foremost, the pervasive paranoia that the protagonist mentions (I first thought it was ironic) is just that — paranoia. It provides approximately as much protection from terror as the duck-and-cover “strategies” of the fifties:
Both are a kind of public (and very expensive) Kibuki theater. The purpose of the production is to persuade us that something is being done. The fact that the actions are themselves utterly worthless (or worse) is immaterial — it is propaganda, pure and simple.
The answer to the actual question she asks (“Are we safer”) is resoundingly YES!
Further, the current foreign fiasco of Mitt Romney demonstrates how fragile our growing safety is.
* His racist and ignorant comments about Israeli “culture” betray a contempt for the Arab people (and especially Palestinian people) that confirms the darkest accusations of the extremist Muslim world against us.
* The Israeli policies that he supports have led to non-stop war, instability, and human suffering for decades
* The 2003 invasion of Iraq destroyed the region’s strongest secular counterbalance to the Iranian theocracy. In doing so, it exemplifies the ignorant bullying incompetence that has dominated GOP dogma for decades.
We are safer today than we were four years ago because we have walked closer to the civilized world in our response to radical Islamic movements. We are safer today because we have rejected formal policies of kidnap, abuse, torture, and murder. We would be safer still had we closed GITMO.
The most powerful thing we can do, today, to restore our safety and regain our sense of security is to reject this right-wing paranoia and return to the policies of freedom, openness, and tolerance that make us strong.
Christopher says
Their goal is to make us all live in fear and for the narrator of this spot it seems to have worked. I actually do NOT think about terror when I do those things she mentions in the beginning. She is wrong about how we got intel on Bin Laden’s whereabouts and won’t even give this President credit for concluding that particular operation.
ms says
In these pieces, the warmongers push this “Terra-Booga-Muslims-Scary” theme, with no brass tacks specifics about what is really going on in these nations.
These lying warmongers had us attack Iraq. Iraq has never attacked us, and Saddam Hussein had Al-Qaeda types dipped in acid in front of him while he drank whiskey and smoked cigars.
Also, AL-QAEDA IS SUNNI (AND MILITANTLY ANTI-SHIA) WHILE IRAN IS A SHIA THEOCRACY.
The push for war makes no sense when you look at what is really happening.
whosmindingdemint says
better check those cookies in the oven.